Habitat Magazine Issue 2

HABITAT m a g a z i ne

Masthead Editor-In-Chief Josh Corson Managing Editor Emma LaSaine Fiction Editor Bethany Bendtsen Nonfiction Editor Mimi Rosales Poetry Editor Meg Caldwell Readers Tabitha Chartos Ana Hlavatovich Alicia Komes Zoe Raines Macy Sego Gretchen Sterba

Cover Artwork Sam Dobson Body Map #6, 2016, Acrylic on Fabriano Paper, 150cm x 100cm.

Layout Design Mitch Stomner

May, 2017 Issue 2

Copyright 2017 www.habitatlitmag.com

Contents

Introduction

. . iv

Dan "Sully" Sullivan

When God invented Chicago, he shit . . 1

Chicago, . . 2

It was when and only when . . 4 Lawrence Silveira

This Big, A Lot . . 6 Kenny Kelly

Unauthrorized Person . . 9 Evan Coday Kleekamp

The Door . . 12 Tejas S.

Welfare . . 15 Alison O'Connor

Alison's Brain

. . 20

Betty Heredia

Keep It Moving . . 22

Self-Absorbed . . 23

Grim . . 24 Ayla Maisey

Instagramonster . . 26 Alex Arata

Sixteen Years . . 30 Vanessa Borjon

1101 Gates St.

. . 32

Bianca Smith

The Old Neighborhood . . 34 Sam Dobson

Aesthically Internal . . 40

Self-Portrait on Tuesday . . 41 Bailey E. Heille

Maniac . . 42 Jacob Victorine

On the Occasion of 560. January February 2008

by Jean Luc MyLayne . . 45

Vessel in the Form of Self-Love . . 46

Vessel in the Form of the Body . . 47

iii

Bios . . 49

Acknowledgements . . 53

Introduction

There is something incredible about seeing a magazine come to life. All the effort, the paralyzing doubt giving way to excitement, the overwhelming gratitude for talented, thoughtful contributors. Building the first issue of Habitat Magazine was much like any artistic process— tough at times but undeniably rewarding. When we released Issue 1, Emma and I were brimming with pride and eager to continue building a place where young and established writers alike could share their work. We hoped these writers would boldly embrace the power of language to innovate, to teach us something new and important, speaking from the margins to reclaim their place in the collective conversation of literary culture. With these ideals in mind, we set out to find a team of editors for Issue 2.

Coming off an amazing first issue, we wanted to make Habitat a place of fresh ideas. That's why, for the next issue, we decided to go hold an application process in order to find our new team. New editors meant new perspectives on writing and the world, and this was Habitat’s mission after all. Following careful consideration, we eagerly welcomed Bethany Bendtsen, Meg Caldwell, and Mimi Rosales as our Issue 2 editorial staff. These artists and editors displayed an uncanny ability to critique, empathize with, and select pieces of writing that aligned with Habitat’s core values. As a unified team, we focused our energy on solidifying our understanding of what we wanted this issue to encapsulate into three areas of focus: New Horizons: We want to feature writing that takes risks, pushing the limits of genre, and is, simply, fresh.

Reclaiming Space: A part of Habitat’s mission is to use our privilege and accessibility to provide writers from marginalized communities with a platform to reclaim the space they deserve.

Emerging Writers: Art isn’t art without the presence of new voices, new energy, and new works. We want to support writers breaking into the scene with their first publication who display serious skills.

Collectively, we felt it wasn’t enough for us to just recognize these qualities in the writers we published. We wanted to reward them for their courage, too. Based on our three core ideals, we created the Habitat Lit Awards and selected one piece for each area of focus to receive the award in the category we felt it most embodied. For Issue 2, we are proud to present the New Horizons Award to “The Door” (Evan Coday Kleekamp), the Reclaiming Space Award to iv

Introduction

“1101 Gates St.” (Vanessa Borjon), and the Emerging Writers Award to “Welfare” (Tejas S.). I am incredibly humbled by the vulnerability and courage of these writers and am eternally grateful for their faith in Habitat to publish their work. I am overjoyed to extend a small monetary award to these recipients.

I find so much comfort in talking about all this progress and achievement because despite the love we felt for the work and the energy fueling this issue, this year has straight up sucked.

America elected a monster. But a President and cabinet that offhandedly spout xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, and homophobic rhetoric is not new to America. I won’t deny that I wasn’t still shocked—I understand this to be because I am a cis white man. I simply do not (and will never) face the same challenges as the friends and family I love who are constantly the target of hate and violence (before the election and after it). I can’t say I know how to fix the systemic issues this country faces—or even the issues institutions I take part in daily, like universities, foundations, and writing centers, face. It is not in my power to provide answers. What I have chosen to do, and to make Habitat about, is providing support.

Lots of magazines, institutions, and outlets run by liberal cis white men say things like, “We want to give a voice to those that are silenced.” But I don’t believe in that. Habitat cannot give a voice to anybody, because every person already has a voice. What Habitat can do is provide a space that listens to, amplifies, and supports those voices. This is our part of the revolution.

Issue 2 is amazing. Dan “Sully” Sullivan will make you laugh aloud and then quietly pause to think. Betty Heredia will bring you face-to-face with the cacophonous internal voice of anxiety. Sam Dobson will fearlessly show you the body, inside and out. Kenny Kelly will cause you to examine your own apathy. Tejas S. will make you believe in compassion again. Habitat is lucky to feature their and all the other artists’ work. I hope you have fun reading this issue, because we had a lot of fun putting it together.

Welcome Home, Josh Corson Editor-In-Chief

v

HABITAT m a g a z i ne

Dan "Sully" Sullivan

Dan "Sully" Sullivan

When God invented Chicago, he shit

out a line of buildings to perpetrate the sky like blips on a stolen land heart monitor. Whoever he had here first ain’t here no more but we got churches all day like this land holy.

Some kinda way to pay respect. Pews like crack ed ribs lining the bowels.

We talk out the corners and wonder why we don’t hear back. His body ain’t our body. So what we consuming? Communion crackers everywhere. I think God is just some imagined museum without no free days. I think he’s laughing. He laughs in long sentences like governors in county. His laugh cracks open like a rock through a schoolhouse window on the Westside, cold. His laugh, a gas rag siphoning down tenement rows.

His laugh must be a redline tunnel carving out our throat. When God invented Chicago, he laughed and the view from the Oak St side of Lake Shore Drive burped out his belly like some sorta consolation prize.

1

Poetry

Chicago,

You think you can scare us, like your winters mean something like we ain’t as stubborn as you like this windchill fool somebody like we ain’t got this here couch cousin in a parking spot like our folks didn’t teach us how to rock a stuck car.

How many pipes gotta burst?

How many water heaters gotta break down?

How many grammas gotta die in their sleep?

You act like you don’t want us, like we don’t know how to start fires like we can’t turn

bodies to saunas radiators to humidifiers viaducts to furnaces

like you can wear that vortex and we won’t mean mug back like we ain’t got it easy.

Grey ain’t nothing but a color we ain’t wearing. Us Sox fans might wear black but it ain’t cus we mourn

no beer ticket line K-Town rocket pops or your thirsty hot breath.

You think you can hold summer over our head like we ain’t got a skyline worth of shade?

That bean ain’t nothing but your cold dead heart.

2

Dan "Sully" Sullivan

We got a bag of salt for that slippery tongue.

We'll polar bear a gut throught that ice.

Why you think we wear all this deep dish?

3

Poetry

It was when and only when

I was standing on the corner of Ashland and Division outside of the historic bank building turned CVS that I first saw the thing I knew was larger than it was because it was there that then-governor Rod Blagojevich was sitting in the backseat of a very official looking black SUV with tinted windows and you know the kind I am referring to because you are familiar with the images of presidential motorcades that flash across your television whenever the POTUS arrives in Hyde Park to visit home with the First Lady and Lake Shore Drive shuts down for a few hours intermittently as they fly by Lake Michigan in what I can only imagine as a very dream-like and visceral experience for two people who have witnessed the Southside of Chicago at its best and worst and now are returning to this place that was or is or was home and how it must effect them to live in the White House that the First Lady has pointed out in her speech was built by slaves and at the same moment live in a house on Chicago’s mid-southern end just blocks from the University of Chicago and have it all surrounded by secret service agents dressed like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones but without the jokes and with a much more menacing or at least serious demeanor and it was this moment, not the television you are watching, but the standing on Ashland and Division by the bus stop and the elotes cart and the bank turned CVS next to Rod Blagojevich, or at least what I would find out was Rod Blagojevich inside of his black SUV, because two women approached the closed, tinted window and knocked on it to see who was inside and when Blago rolled down the window in what I can only assume in his head was a political opportunity or a photo opp with “everyday folks” as I imagine he might say it and when he opened his mouth to say, “Hi Ladies” one of the women laughed, turned abruptly and excitedly toward the other and screamed, “See I told you it was that motherfucker” and they walked away giggling only to leave the then-governor to slowly roll up his window in an awkward moment where myself and a handful of others standing at the Ashland bus stop to witness this glorious moment smirked and it was then and only then that I realized even at only three decades into my life I was so connected to 1871 when Chicago burned and burned and burned until it had to settle into the shoreline and people came together to rebuild but it was never rebuilt or never the same and it is still burning and the then-governor would later end up in prison for attempting to sell the President-Elect’s senate seat and prison is where he may have always been heading toward because that’s where governors in this city often end up so much so that four of our last seven have spent time behind bars and it reminds me of how our now-mayor Rahm Emmanuel does the ditty-bitty business of closing schools and rearranging the lines in which students feel safe on the street in their own neighborhood and parents must volunteer to stand in rows for blocks so that kids don’t get shot headed to their new schools that will also be shut down between the rows of tenement housing and the rows of pews at our church’s in which mothers and fathers morn the loss of their sons and the guns arrive freely from Indiana trunk shows and no one knows where they came from except it 4

Dan "Sully" Sullivan

is widely known where they come from yet the schools keep closing and closing and burning and downtown keeps getting more flowers for the Taste and more festivals and rows of vendors and the grills light up like the lifeline of a skyline that burns in the reflection of the Chicago riverboats and water taxis and it seems that half the city is not the city and is the only part of the city and it is in this moment even though there are rows and rows of buildings that puncture our blue perception.

5

Fiction

Lawrence Silviera

This Big, A Lot

Dear Agnes, I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice. I miss the sparkle of your eyes. I miss your hair and the way it cascades down your shoulders, crawling with lice. I miss you.

Remember our first date? We were both in that park, when the night sky was alive with stars and the air around us was cool and fresh and filled with some sort of magic that only we could sense. Our eyes met across the grassy terrain, and I tipped my hat to you. Its feather fluttered out, and as that piece of plumage swept through the air, you caught it.

You handed it to me, saying, “Nutter Butter, this floated away but then I caught it like I caught the flu from Aunt Judy that one time but that time isn’t this time and this time is important because I can feel the passion in the air from your feather so I’m giving it back to you but I wish I could hold onto it forever and ever and ever and ever and ever for all of time and this big, a lot.”

And then remember how we spotted the playground equipment and climbed up that slide the wrong way, even though we weren’t supposed to? We were terrified that someone might catch us! But no one did, so we laughed. We laughed for what seemed like an eternity, just you and I. But it was actually only forty-three minutes. And then we were just sitting up there in that playset’s crow’s nest, gazing at the park around us, and found that wad of gum, remember? It was just stuck there, wasted. So I reached up and peeled it off of the slide’s cracking yellow plastic and bit it in half. I chewed, and then when I’d softened it up enough, I gave it to you, and took the other half for myself. It tasted like spearmint and it was pink, but I didn’t really care about the taste or the color. I only cared about how your face lit up when I gave you the wad, how your missing-tooth smile stretched from ear to ear and how your tomato-red cheeks ripened before my very eyes. I still care.

And, just like when we were together, I still feel sad sometimes, too. But now, I don’t have you there to take me into your arms and whisper in my ear the sweet nothings you’d tell me.

You’d always say just the right thing to cheer me up.

I remember one time when I was so distraught over that one scoop of Rum and Raisin ice cream falling out of my cone, you told me, “Triple Stuf Vanilla Oreo, it’ll all get better one day because today is not the future and it’s also the day after yesterday which means that the past is 6

Lawrence Silviera

behind us so we’re young and we’re free to just be ourselves with each other in the world around us and the sky above us and the ground beneath us with Aunt Judy in it who really did like seeing the two of us together before she slipped on that steamy pile of rice and accidentally hit her head on that pirate statue with everyone on the pier noticing but us because our love is so strong and meaningful and blinding and important and I love you so much and this big, a lot.”

And then you kissed me with that wet, juicy, slimy, oozing, glorious mouth-hole. And then I kissed you back, knowing everything would be all right. Everything would be all right.

But everything is not all right. Not anymore. I can’t help but look back at that last night we shared together. We were sprawled out in bed, our bodies warm with post-love sweat, silk sheets woven around our legs like ivy. The moment was perfect. Our love was perfect. You were perfect. But then I went and messed it all up. I know it was my fault, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

I’m so so so so so really really very sorry this big, a lot. I got up out of bed and trudged across the bedroom and opened that cabinet that I now know I shouldn’t have opened in front of you.

I thought our love was strong enough to endure my life-long obsession, my biggest flaw. But it wasn’t. It really, really wasn’t.

I opened that cabinet, its dark wood glistening in the moonlight that streaked through the open window, and pulled out my 1999 Special Edition Tropical Furby. I cradled that Furby in my arms and stroked its tuft of yellow hair as if it were my own child. It was my own child—is!

But you hated that Furby. You hated that Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, teal sunglasses-stylin’ Furby just like you hated all Furbies. How was I to know that you were a Furby-hater?

How was I to know when we first met that we would never work out because of my Furby?

My darling Furby. I offered it to you—something I never did with anyone—but you rejected it.

You shot out of bed and grabbed your things, yelling, “I can’t be with you anymore, Chewy Sweet ’n Salty Salted Caramel Chunk Chocolate Chip Chips Ahoy! Cookie, because I hate Furbies and I always have because of the things that they do and the things that they say when you’re not looking and I know that you can’t ever witness them coming to life but they do and don’t we all but they’re not supposed to because they’re not a real human thing person but we are and it’s not okay for the Furbies to be like us because we’re us and they’re them and Aunt Judy’s a corpse but we never talk about it and our love just will never work out because I don’t like Furbies and so I don’t like you and I don’t like you or Furbies this big, a lot.”

And then you left.

After those seventy-four hours that we shared together, and also after sixty-five hours thinking about it and you and the whole situation, but especially you, I decided that my love of Furbies can never be broken. I love Furbies. But I loved you too, and in another universe it would work out. You would love Furbies too and we’d go on adventures together, we’d travel the world 7

Fiction

together, we’d go to the grocery store and buy as much of the yeast as we desire together.

But this isn’t a different universe, and we just didn’t work out. Still, I miss you. I miss you this big, a lot.

All my wads of gum,

Felix

8

Kenny Kelly

Kenny Kelly

Unauthorized Person

His stench makes me wonder if this is what we’d all smell like if we didn’t have soap and shampoo and baths. He parrots with the recording, This is Clark and Division. Bing bong! Doors closing. He pushes his way through the car. The people listening to their headphones don’t hear him coming, so he moves them away with his paws. He mumbles something I don’t understand.

Probably asking for change. I could hand him a dollar. I’ve been trying to be more generous lately.

After all, what’s a dollar? You can’t buy anything with a dollar. Except for a candy bar. Which, now that I think of it, I spent my last single on a Snickers from a vending machine. I have some fives left, but I can’t ask him to break change, obviously. Maybe I can ask someone around me, but then he’ll know that I have more, and well, if you give a mouse a cookie. Sorry pal. Maybe next time.

A college kid leans against the emergency exit connecting this car with the next. The bum growls and the kid jumps away, wide-eyed. The bum pulls the door open and goes out, letting all the cold in. The air licks the back of my neck. I’m glad I didn’t give him a dollar.

The door shuts, and the kid shouts, “He’s going to kill himself!”

Once, I was waiting for a train that was stopped because someone jumped in front of it.

They said the train was delayed because of “an unauthorized person on the tracks.” It made me late for an interview.

Someone says, “I thought he just said he had to pee.”

The kid says, “I heard him. He’s going to jump off the train.”

Another says, “Is he still out there?”

Some of us look out the window. The rest keep looking at their phones or listening to their music. The bum stands silhouetted between the cars watching the tracks pass under him, waiting to jump. My heart murmurs in my chest with the clack-clack, clack-clack of the train over the rails. I just want to go home. I don’t want to sit here for another half hour. I don’t want to be on the car that runs him over, riding along as he dies underneath my feet. Would we feel it?

This is North and Clybourn. Bing bong! Doors closing.

9

Fiction

Did anyone getting on see the bum out there like a gremlin on the wing?

The kid is still looking out the window. The bum has his back turned to us. I remember the emergency call button but there are so many bodies between me and it. I should tell someone to hit it but nobody else seems panicked. Maybe I’m making too much of it. Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time. Maybe he really did just have to pee.

The emergency door opens again and it’s so cold I can’t breathe. The bum walks back in and shuts the door. The bum wears a weird grin.

We’re together in our silence until the kid says, “It’s warmer in here.”

That’s the best you can do?

He says it again because the bum didn’t hear him.

“Yeah, I s’pose you’re right. Heh heh.”

“What’s your name?” the kid extends his hand.

The bum shakes. “J. Edgar Hoover. FBI.” “I’m Ben. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hoover. You, uh, you seen the Bulls lately?”

“No, no. Can’t say that I have.”

Of course he hasn’t, Ben. Does he look like he has a TV? I should say something, throw Ben a bone, but I can’t think of anything.

“They winning?”

“They would if Derrick Rose wasn’t hurt.”

“He still hurt? Man, that guy always hurt.”

“But when he’s healthy—” “He’s fire.”

They laugh, and the bum puts a hand on the kid’s shoulder, but the kid doesn’t seem to mind.

10

Kenny Kelly

This is Fullerton. Bing bong! Doors closing.

“Heh heh, that my favorite part.”

“What is?”

“When the doors close and the bell goes bing bong!”

“You know, I haven’t noticed it, but it is cool, isn’t it?”

“It never used to be like that. Conductor used to call it out. Every stop.”

“Huh, I never knew that.”

“That ’cause you young.”

“You got that right.”

The bum goes on about the history of the CTA. The kid is a master. Responding to everything with “That’s really interesting,” “You don’t say?” and “You’re absolutely right.”

At Sheridan the bum is smiling. “This my stop, youngblood.”

He walks off upright, singing along with the recording. It’s a beautiful tune.

Everyone, including the kid, is looking down at their phones. No one understands that we just witnessed a miracle. A man lives because of a simple kindness. But they don’t care. I want it to mean to them what it means to me. I want to shake them by the shoulders, tear out my hair, shout, “Don’t you see? Can’t you feel it? It’s warmer in here.”

I smile at the man as we pull away, to let him know I understand. He doesn’t see me. We leave the platform behind and the rest of the ride no one says anything, not “Excuse me,” not “Sorry,” not “Thank you.” I want to say something to the kid, ask him what it was like, reward him somehow, but he doesn’t need me.

We get delayed between Berwyn and Bryn Mawr. By the time we reach my stop the sun is long gone. I wrap my scarf around my face and head into the snow. I wish my stupid neighbors would shovel their sidewalks.

When I get home, first thing, I heat up a microwave burrito. It’s cold in the middle but I eat it anyway. I sit in front of the TV and stay there until 11:00 p.m. when the news comes on. A fire has killed three people in Gary, Indiana. I fall asleep and dream of how I could have saved them.

11

Poetry

Evan Coday Kleekamp

The Door Selected as the recipient

of the New Horizons Award

We drive to the wrong address. You get out of the car and reach for the beers in your bag behind the seat while I scan the block looking for what might be a bonfire. We are a few blocks south of Douglas Park near the intersection of Ogden and Kedzie. It’s November, but the season emulates spring with its temperate, rolling fog; the streetlights adapt vaguely geometric patterns. You wander the street. I peer into an empty industrial building. I take off my glasses from time to time and wipe them clean. We start to think our destination might be a warehouse. You call Michelle who says something to the effect of: The party is back in Logan Square. I have to open the car with my key because you can only lock and unlock our car through the passenger-side door. I jokingly refer to the car as “our car” because I know it agitates you. You gave me a key to the car when you first moved here so I could be responsible for moving it during inclement weather, but most of the time it’s just an excuse for me to open the door of your vehicle to let you in. Our performance is without end or equal. Ask anyone who knows us and they will say it is unclear if I am your sibling or your chauffeur or your lover. We only bring one set of keys. You are back in the driver’s seat and tell me to open a beer. We know each other from our days in Missouri when you were a graduate student and I was your scandalous protégé turned research assistant. The affairs you maintained now belong to the larger mythology of the area while the sports management lecturer I used to occasion understood me as low-yield entertainment. After we had sex, he would pass out with the television on, which is to say I explored a different vicissitude of casual intercourse and selfabnegation. I reflect on this as we idle at the intersection as directed by the red orb floating in the canister above. In Missouri, beyond being legal, drinking in the passenger seat is a sort of social obligation: the passenger holds, sips from, and passes the container to the driver so that, whenever possible, they may take a large swig. The activity’s popularity is substantiated across the state. As such, a code of intimacy between friends who repeatedly drink and drive together is developed: at least we will die together, the saying goes. Does the street look wider to you than when we came?

Did you know the stadium where the Bulls play is to our right? Remember how we fought the other day in the Mexican restaurant because you didn’t like that I was right and you were wrong and it was probably just weird for you because you had to admit to yourself that I was growing up and forming into someone you would have to consider your rival? Maybe that’s why you smiled through your false tears. I’m glad we both decided to go our separate ways. Otherwise I wouldn’t have met that boy downtown and let him take me to the beach. I wouldn’t have taken the train to Rogers Park and seen that door at the intersection of Arthur and Glenwood, which I knew immediately must remain closed unless our comings and goings were to fragment. I came toward the door and felt a string in my chest vibrate. I could not see past its darkened corridor. When I drew close to it, I could sense my vision weaken; the pulse in my veins stilled. Meanwhile: We are coming upon a crossroad. We arrive to the party and follow the small path that leads behind the house. The gate 12

Evan Coday Kleekamp

is left open for visitors like us to clarify how and where to enter. The path is made of cement slabs: on the path’s right is a chain-link fence; to its left dense foliage prevents us from seeing the bonfire until the people surround us. We perform a quick survey. We discover that we don’t know anyone and you text Michelle again to let her know we are in her backyard. We go upstairs where Michelle introduces us to Jen, whose hand you take and deftly rotate into your own. Michelle takes us on a tour of the apartment and even tries to show us Declan’s room because he has a couch with a pullout bed instead of a mattress, but Declan doesn’t think that’s necessary. We station ourselves in the kitchen near the whiskey and Jen makes it clear that she is sexually interested in us, but does not make that clear to her boyfriend, Joe. We don’t like Joe before we meet him and even less when he starts to patrol the room looking for a way to insert himself into our conversation. My first mistake: Jen is much taller than me and I assume she is into you. The second mistake is failing to notice that everyone thinks we are a poly couple. This is probably for the better: I don’t think either us of, in our years as friends, have learned or desired to mitigate our sexual appetite; we decide that, at bare minimum, everyone at this party is into us. Recently, we attempted a lite threesome with a partner of yours that ended with you dismissing me to the couch after forcing me into your underwear. We were both drunk when we discovered that our friends would get upset if we made out and have done little to perpetuate the idea that things will return to normal anytime soon. Your roommate offered to be at hand with a video recording device should an urge strike for us to engage in what I can only describe as casual intercourse adapted for the stage. We are back outside by the fire and listening to Michelle announce Declan and Olma’s engagement. Yanna, who I was speaking to a few moments ago, is no longer standing beside me. For a second, I miss Don and maybe you do too. You’re busy flirting with Amir. We’re in the void, I think. There are so many people I don’t recognize that I don’t notice my bladder has left my body until we return to the kitchen upstairs. What I mean to say is that sometimes my nerves lag and I receive sensations from across the room where I used to be. For example, my bladder is full, but it is over there against the wall following a trajectory to where I am now and I can feel it zigzag along the path I just completed as I drink, especially when the whiskey passes through me and warms the corporeal sac of another faceless stranger. We’ve drunk so much the light in your eyes begins to fade. Michelle comes over and introduces us to Ade who gets us high off a wooden pipe he scored from a friend who returned to Nigeria. We’re in the front yard and you run to block the path of the bamboo rod being used to sever the limbs of a Donald Trump piñata hanging in the tree because you want the kids walking down the block to have a chance to experience the last few hours of Democratic Socialism. I’ve gone back inside to use the restroom, but it’s occupied. I pour more whiskey in my cup and saddle up to Jen who left Joe in the living room where a small band of men have gathered to watch cage fighting play across the wall via projector. I have no idea where you are until you appear back in the kitchen without Amir because he and Michelle are in a relationship. Olma and Jen and Ben and I get into a conversation about the election in which I somehow throw off my veil of cynicism and argue for the sake of arguing. The evening’s climax occurs right around the time you take off your shirt and pin a plastic button in the shape of a star to your bra which reads: SHERIFF. Michelle has us stand in the photo booth so she can take our picture. We are half-naked, about halfway through our lives and we decide that we love Jen the next morning when we go to brunch with Ade, which he believes to be a sex date, and tell him about the mansion we found near Sacramento 13

Poetry

and Milwaukee with its bronze door. We still had beers in our hands when you walked to the door and looked through the glass as if someone lived there. I should have told you about the door I saw in Rogers Park. How it stood there unsurpassed. I should have warned you not to touch it. And when we tailed the building we would’ve never put our eyes to the hole in its black picket fence.

We would’ve never understood that we were its attendants, its gatekeepers sent to prevent traffic from entering by either side. You would’ve never pressed your finger to the doorbell beside the door. We wouldn’t have understood why, as we stood there, the bell roared and roared and roared; why, as the door faded, as the bronze toppled into waves, the suggestion of a rectangle repeated, coalesced, and remained.

14

Tejas S.

Tejas S.

Welfare Selected as the recipient

of the Emerging Writers Award

10:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday to Saturday, Shrinivas sat behind an iron grill with a semicircular hole through which myriad hands passed him bills and notes. Armed with a computer and a printer which stamped long reels of perforated paper with bill details, he worked automatically, entering the account numbers, the bill amounts, noting the delays and consequent fines, and then, signing in a sort of shabby cursive on receipts, handed them over to customers and impaled the original bill on a spindle.

There was a post office farther down the street, and sometimes he watched the postmen cycle up and down, most of them growing old on the pittances and watery tea the post office provided. They delivered notices to the Electricity Board Office, while the fax machine remained unused, inboxes empty.

The job wasn’t depressing, but Shrinivas could not honestly count himself among the happy denizens of the city. He realized that he was more a government slave than a servant of the people, but as long as the pay was on time and no one asked him any tough questions, there really was nothing very offensive about the musty office. Three tables for three people, a file cabinet arranged in the corner. A bust of Shivaji Maharaj sat on the table nearest to the partition. On the sculpture’s head was a rose with the bud removed. His mother had always said it was more respectful that way. It’d just become habit later.

Shrinivas had been working there for close to four years and, while new people kept moving into the locality, there were always regulars—both in arrival and in schedule. Some habitually came the very next day after they received their bills. Others were perennial defaulters, ever ready to pay the paltry fine. He knew who fell into each category by observing their hands.

The texture gave away a lot. The poor and the old came early. The better-financed and young invariably late. He tended to easily remember hands that defied these class lines, for they were few and far between.

Whenever an exceptionally beautiful hand came through the opening in the grill, he would stare transfixed for a few seconds at the slender fingers that rested almost lovingly on the ledge.

He never looked up to the face, afraid to risk disappointment. Otherwise, that came very easily too. It was not uncommon for another hand to follow, bearing an unspoken ward-off, a marital band.

It had happened a few times that the hands had precipitated a dam-burst of memories. A 15

Fiction

pensioner’s wrinkled and liver-spotted skin brought back visions of the summer-brown mountains of the South, the lithe mountain goats clambering up thin ledges, and the temple upon the hill.

One afternoon, when the office was closed for lunch and the others were out, Shrivinas examined himself in the mirror from different locations, trying to see how he had changed from his lanky, clean-shaven college days. Much fatter than he had ever been. His face was covered by a three-day beard that made him look like he’d been used as a pinboard. Reflecting light into a white glare, his rimless rectangular spectacles hid his eyes. Put that together with the large yellow dot of tilak on his glabella—and he could easily be mistaken for a hardliner Hindu, textbook bigot. The tilak was the only thing his mother would’ve approved of. Always tired and drawn out, hair thinning before she’d even touched forty, she’d made Shrinivas groom himself almost obsessively. Once he moved out, he let himself go with a vengeance.

Shrivinas’s father had been—and still was—silent and introverted, sitting on the leather sofa with his sausage-shaped fingers steepled and his eyes closed, often dressed only in a blue lungi and a sleeveless undershirt. They’d drifted apart after his mother had died, and the man now spent his time in dingy local restrobars. Incapable and jealous, he’d resented Chacha’s aid towards Shrinivas. Called it charity—beggars’ wages. Shrinivas smiled to himself, marvelling at how closely his thoughts now resembled his father’s—even though it was Chacha who had been more like the providing father. Shrinivas had even copied Chacha’s hairstyle.

Without much regret, he remembered wishing his intellectual abilities would compensate for his lack of physical attractiveness in the eyes of the prospective partners, for whom he had once shaved and combed, perfumed and preened, but nothing had come of that wish. To be honest, he hadn’t really tried.

He gave a start, realising that the postman had been watching through the door for a couple of minutes. With as much dignity as Shrinivas could muster, he went to the door and reached out a silent hand for the envelope, extending the other with a twenty rupee note as he retrieved his letter. The postman gave him a knowing smile. He got another ten rupees. Not that word would get out. Shrinivas was unmarried and lived alone. No one cared about the eccentricities of such a man.

Shrinivas sat down at his table, held the envelope to the sunlight, and abruptly dropped it when he saw the name printed in Courier, and the signature in fountain pen below that.

The distinctive slant of hand was unmistakable, and images of teak bookshelves towering over him flashed through his mind: him five feet four inches tall, looking up in wonder at all the books he barely understood the titles of. The lawyer at his polished desk smiling at him, proud.

“Your grandfather told me you’re excelling at school, Shrinu.”

16

Tejas S.

It was the lawyer’s wife who’d written.

Slackjawed, Shrinivas had not registered the lawyer’s words.

“If only my son showed as much interest,” he went on. “Maybe I should just adopt you and make you my heir.”

It was obvious now that it was wishful—both on the lawyer’s part and his—to imagine Shrinivas would ever inherit anything but socioeconomic baggage. The lawyer’s son, the letter said, had inherited the firm and, in a sustained manner, run it into the ground. Shrinivas expected that he would be asked for some funds to get them started up again. He could do that.

He lived frugally anyhow, and had savings he would never use. It would give him a chance to pay Chacha back for all those years of informal scholarships. Some scholar he had become.

As he read on, Chachi’s tone became more and more pleading. Their office hadn’t yet been closed down. They were still living in their bungalow. But Chacha’s books had been sold off, she said, along with the rosewood bookshelves. The table was gone too. Now they used a plastic chair and a plastic table with a hole in the centre, the purpose of which was long gone from human memory.

Then she went on to tell him how even their grocery bills had been unpaid for three months, since February. Chacha was too proud to borrow money from his friends, and their son was already neck-deep in debt. She could not, therefore, ask Shrinivas for money. Even her conscience balked at that.

But their power supply had been cut off for a few days now—non-payment of bills—and she’d remembered Shrinivas from the old days, the son of those two poor kindergarten teachers.

She’d heard that he now worked for the Electricity Board. Surely he could, if and when the situation arose, have the person in charge turn a blind eye to a single month’s bill? It could not be more than thirty-five thousand, she said, but Chacha was too proud to let anyone cover it for him, and her son too arrogant. Still, if she somehow arranged for the bill to be overlooked her son would not be averse to the situation. Chacha, of course, would not be told about this.

So far it was working—he felt pity, and empathy too, from his days of just getting by. He read on, unease tightening his stomach and knotting his brow.

“Shrinivas, you know Chacha always helped you when you were young. Getting through school, paying that college donation of yours.”

He pursed his lips. He’d taken his first salary to Chacha, hoping to pay back all the money in a few months. Welfare money, he thought. But Chacha had been angry, telling Shrinivas that he didn’t want any of his money and he wouldn’t be treated like a bania by someone he considered a son.

17

Fiction

Shrinivas had been hosted well enough that day. Chachi fed him well. But he’d felt strange even then. The lawyer was not the most honest of people, even among those of his profession.

Sitting in the sunlight that filtered through kitschy, almost-opaque windows painted green, Shrinivas had realized that being in Chacha’s debt meant owing him a favour. Almost like Chacha was buying his silence, for embezzlements past and future. Years later these misgivings were being justified.

“We may soon have to declare bankruptcy. And these bills…. Remember, God rewards gratefulness, Shrinivas. Do what you think is best. Do not forget this old woman who has not rarely fancied herself a mother to you.”

And so the welfare money came back as he had expected it to. He could have the bill forgotten. His colleagues embezzled larger amounts in an offhand quotidian manner. But on principle he would not steal.

He had been bitter, as a college-goer, that he was there on a scholarship. Once when he joined a protest against the management, he was later called in alone. They wondered how a good student could get involved with such rabble. Especially because the college had done so much for him. He should be honoured. This ungrateful behaviour hurt on a personal level, they said.

Confused, Shrinivas had walked out with his head bent. True, the institution had given him innumerable opportunities. He was thankful for that. But did that mean he could no longer protest against bad food? Against professors who sat behind their desks and refused to teach?

He wished he could return all the money he’d used—others’ money. But the sources were so diffused, so numerous, he barely remembered them. He could not help it, he was a child of welfare, with all the lifelong baggage of gratitude that accompanied this position.

It was then he’d resolved to return Chacha’s money, to be rid of the plaguing worry that someday he would be asked for a favour he could neither refuse nor grant in good conscience.

And now that unreturned money had come back into his life, asking him to forget his morals and bitterness and pay back in kind a loan he’d been prevented from repaying in cash.

Gratitude dictated he should stop thinking of his ideals and do what Chachi asked. It would not cost him anything. Or maybe it would. Any time those embezzling colleagues got into trouble he would be a convenient scapegoat. Or someone would blabber, some overenthusiastic RTI-toting citizen. Truth was, he could find as many reasons not to help as he could find to lend assistance.

Shrinivas jammed a toffee between his teeth and went out for a short stroll. He thought of his job. He thought of his quiet existence. The humiliations, perceived and otherwise, of being a 18

Tejas S.

welfare child. Came back, sat at his desk. We aren’t a welfare state any longer.

He was a government officer. Opening a file cabinet, he put the envelope at the bottom of a stack of papers he’d stored there. People in his profession were famous for practised ignorance, and Shrinivas was only happy to stick to the status quo.

He got a glass of water, put his lips to the rim, drank, and wiped his moustache with the back of his hand. Patted the bust of Shivaji affectionately. Checked again the date and time on an invitation he’d received to someone’s wedding. The boy from E-7, he remembered. Dinner was settled, then. He sat back in his chair, combed his hair with his fingers, and went back to work.

Umbrellas, he remembered. That’s what the holes in plastic tables were for. He laughed to himself. How horribly moralistic, he thought. Always save for a rainy day.

19

Poetry

Alison O'Connor It’s a rotting carcass that aches from over-stimulation and half-assed research. see: criminal tattoos see: Marvel’s Daredevil It tries and tries for the wrong things. see: complete memorization of Sopranos trivia It’s got a sick soundtrack: UGK and Three 6 Mafia on loop.

It’s a recurring recording of the word "tit" over and over It smells dried clay, pink friday perfume, months-old halloween candy: enough to suffocate an elephant

20

Alison's Brain

Betty Heredia

Betty Heredia Keep It Moving 22 Self-Absorbed 23 Grim 24-25

21

Nonfiction

Ayla Maisey

Instagramonster

I check her Instagram one or two times a week. I don’t know how it started. I scroll through comments, past three new pictures she’s posted since I checked it last. Dislike myself a little bit more with every swipe of my right thumb. My left hand is braced against my sternum, to hold my chest together.

Another sunset picture. My heart squeezes in. Another selfie. Something heavy and slow and acidic crawls up my throat.

The first time, I only managed less than a minute on her page before I had to close the app and turn my phone off in disgust. Disgusted by her, disgusted even more by myself. For having similar haircuts, for thinking she looks better with a nose ring than I ever could. For wondering what her voice sounds like and how her eyes crinkle when she laughs.

My cat sleeps next to me in guileless solidarity. I bury my face in his shoulder, breathe in his warmth until the fingers of nausea uncurl from around my gut.

••• My best friend, Leya, says it’s normal. I don’t even have to type her whole username.

Instagram hands it over after the first two letters. This elicits another small surge of shame, another rusted spill from the leaky faucet behind my heart.

“Her Instagram is very basic, dude,” Leya says. “Don’t stress.”

I smile at her over our iPhones, but apprehension climbs through me, up the ladder sketched by the things this phantom girl and I have in common: • • • •

We’re reading the same book right now.

We like the same pretentious punk band.

Cat lover.

Outspoken feminist.

And the worst of them: She’s a writing major too?

Oh, fuck, fuck.

26

Ayla Maisey

Calm down. It’s screenwriting. You hate screenwriting. Nonfiction and screenwriting are basically polar opposites ... of the same room.

Fuck.

I start to wonder if the reason he likes me is because I am so similar to her. If I’m skating on the momentum of this girl’s personality and the two years he spent with her. If the only things keeping him interested are the ways in which we are different.

••• A year ago, miles away and months before I met him, my friend Sara and I sit on her trampoline in the dark. Moths arc across the lamplight, making it flutter around us like seawater with their shadows.

“It just....” she sighs and picks up one of the dozens of pine needles that have collected on the tarp fabric. “It just sucks that he broke things off because he wanted to be single before his trip and now I find this post he’s tagged in when he’s on a date with another girl. I wish he could have just told me.” She swallows and breaks the pine needle into tiny little pieces. “And I wish I hadn’t found the post.”

I watch her and say nothing. Wait for her to say something else.

“Do you ever feel jealous?” she turns to me suddenly.

I break eye contact and plunge my own hand into the pine needles.

“Not really. There’s no one for me to be jealous of. Or for,” I say nonchalantly, and then curl my fist around the needles until they shatter against my skin.

••• When I’m not staring at her pictures, I realize how horrified he would be if he knew I was insecure about this.

I start to remember how much I make him laugh. How the way he looks at me burns color into my skin. All of the things he has said to me come rushing back in delicious waves of affection. None of them imply, “You remind me of my ex.”

And really, I don’t look that much like her anyway.

••• 27

Nonfiction

The hardest pictures to scroll through are, of course, the ones of them together. Two Septembers ago in a pumpkin patch: She wears his jacket. Last Fourth of July: They kiss with sparklers in their outstretched hands. This Fourth of July: The sharp whistles and bangs outside my window make me jump and scare the cat off my bed.

I close the app, but don’t log out. Throw my phone across the covers, but not far enough away that I can’t reach it.

••• September: His parents are showing me his baby pictures in their living room in Illinois, and he’s laughing like he’s embarrassed, but really I think he’s pleased that I cared enough to ask. Here he is at three, grinning at the camera from his perch on his dad’s lap. Here he is at six, holding hands with his younger sister. The same beautiful eyes and the same mess of hair that I love to tangle my hands in.

“You haven’t seen Star Wars?” I ask him incredulously, since his mother brought it up.

“No….” he calls back from his bedroom upstairs.

“Don’t tell Jay! Star Wars is her life.”

And then I’m face-to-face with his parents, who have suddenly gone quiet, confused but too polite to ask how I know his ex-girlfriend and why I would bring up her name and why she would care if he has seen Star Wars when they have been broken up for four months, and, Oh, what have I done? Because it was not her name I carried in my mouth, but my roommate’s, a different Jay, a different person. And I tell them how my roommate loves science fiction enough to get the Alliance logo tattooed on the back of her neck, and their expressions clear into something like relief, because I think his mother knows how deeply I am in love with him and she saw him bring me his favorite sweatshirt at dinner even though I hadn’t asked.

••• I don’t want to hate this girl, and I’m not entirely sure that I do. I don’t have a real reason to, other than the sophomoric, obvious, banal fact that she’s kissed him more than I have.

If anything, she should hate me. She should be the one scrolling through my pictures and judging my captions, perhaps feeling some sick satisfaction that we have things in common.

But mostly, she should hate me for the minor role I had at the edge of their relationship: careful words of advice, constant texting, a hand brushing hair out of his conflicted eyes, and one 28

Ayla Maisey

colossal, drunken, barely-resisted kiss that brought the tipping point.

It turned out that the edge of their relationship was the end of their relationship, like some pre-Galilean style map where the world drops off at a precipice. Here there be monsters. And they’ll check your Instagram feed.

••• I’m on her page for the third time this week. I’m disregarding Leya’s texts (“You see how ridiculous you’re being about this, right?”) as well as his (one of them says he misses me. I flick the notification away). I am tired of the continual sting of indulging in this monstrous masochism. I know it’s turning into an obsession that is more than likely unreciprocated by the girl on the other end or the boy we both know.

So this time, in some heroically stupid attempt to push the limits of my jealousy and hurt until they can’t touch me, I decide to scroll all the way through her feed. Past sky pictures and pictures with friends, past lunch dates and her trip to Rome. Past the day when he broke up with her—I note with an empathetic pang that there is no photo posted—and asked me to keep him company in his grief. Past every comment by him or his siblings, past every #mcm, past all her poetry screenshots, past the one-year anniversary post. Past every picture of them together until it doesn’t hurt me anymore. Until I begin to laugh when I find out we owned the same favorite dress or make the same expression when we’re in disbelief. Until the boy that’s in those pictures with her is not the same boy that I am dating. Until I never want to look at her feed again.

Until I do. And the map starts over.

29

Nonfiction

Alex Arata

Sixteen Years

There are few things I loathe more than being made to feel young by someone else. This realization doesn’t quite smack me suddenly so much as trickle down like water over my head, over my consciousness, as I sit shotgun in my big brother’s minivan.

This is such a responsible car, I think through the noticeable silence, and as the neon glow from the city creeps onto the freeway we’re zipping down, I feel myself pedaling backward through the years, regressing and shrinking deeper into the past—before the wedding rehearsal snub, before the 300 mile difference, even before the broken movie theater promise. Eighteen, fifteen, ten—You know nothing. You are nothing but a silly, little girl.

I abruptly find myself wishing desperately, violently, that I could learn everything in the world. That if Geoff asked me what my favorite 1970s action flick is, or how I feel about Noam Chomsky, or what the time is in Sri Lanka, I could answer unabashedly—that I could have pride in my awareness. However, the farther we drive, pavement dissipating behind us, the less aware I feel. I imagine that if I was handed something even slightly materially substantial like a snow globe, or a brick, or a vase, it would immediately fall to the ground, as my hands have become paper-thin and precious. I have become miniature in the presence of my brother. Or perhaps he has become a giant. Either way, he eclipses me, and I am lost in the expanding shadow.

When he finally asks if I like the song he’s playing, my heart stutters, searching for an answer I’m convinced I don’t have. Luckily I recover quickly enough, remembering that of course I like this song, I like this whole album—and in fact, have you heard this other artist I know?

Because I think you’d like her.

As I queue up the song I’m recommending to him, I feel as if the inside of my chest contains a chasm of candescence, my sternum surely cracking with the pressure. He’ll hate this, he’ll laugh at it later, he’ll think: What a funny little thing to do—playing a song like that, and you are a joke you are a joke you are a joke.

Naturally there is a silence as he takes the music in, but I cannot hear it over the roar in my skull, the lilting, shameful whine convincing me I must be dying.

“Yeah ... this is good. I like this.” Perhaps the average sister would take it at face value, would believe the earnestness in his voice—but not me. Rattling through my eardrums quickly enough 30

Alex Arata

to penetrate the echoes of his lie, realities of our childhoods—of my childhood—barrel toward me, rapid fire, puncturing the shreds of self confidence I had somehow maintained until now: You were two when he graduated high school, you were playing pretend while he was paying back student loans, you were still shrouded in baby fat and freckles by the time he disappeared and broke your heart and, although he doesn’t know that, he knew the intricacies of the world before you could even read—you perpetual lamb, you wingless cherub. You daft girl.

The song is over, and I am aware casual conversation has been had, despite not recalling a word of it.

Five minutes to several decades later, we arrive at my dorm and he does not ask to come up and I do not invite him. I briefly wonder if he is also thinking about how, despite the fact that we now share a city again for the first time in over ten years, he has never seen inside the place where I live, and probably never will. I resolutely decide the thought hasn’t even crossed his mind.

I thank him for dinner, he cracks a joke, and we part ways.

He goes home to his family.

I call my mom.

31

Poetry

Vanessa Borjon

1101 Gates St. Selected as the recipient

of the Reclaiming Space Award

abuelita’s earring gold knock-off dios te bendiga Manuela a la derecha, holy mother Isaias a la izquierda, temptress 16 year old burn wound the city of Chicago dirt-water fish love-line * azul the color of mourning, the blue house where my sister began her cycle. the color of prayer, every night my grandmother’s eager trot into my bedroom. the color of my hands after she squeezed them too tight, una vez mas, she’d say, tenemos que rezar. * rojo the cherry tree in our front yard, which protected our stonecut virgen de guadalupe, was cut in half during a rainstorm. hit perfectly by symmetrical lightning. our watch dog has died, my father announced. and the boys across the street stopped coming to pick the cherries, the only thing between us was la virgen’s cold offering. no more bruise-red bombs.

32

Vanessa Borjon

* mi papa warmed up our tortillas en la chimenea. we have VHS footage of this: i had just been born, it was early fall and there was frost on the windows. my father in his swim trunks and i am in my baby carriage, warmed by the fire. he flips the tortillas quickly, a skill which turns the hands rough from touching so much fire, which i eventually will inherit. my mother is the one recording and she surprises him, mi amorcito, she calls. he forgets about the tortilla and it burns. in the video i am watching the tortilla turn black unaware that i may burn similarly, a people made of maiz. * verde on the highest shelf in the cubbard of the dining room mis padres kept a roll of bills tightly held together by a rubber band. this was before bank accounts. we were poor, but when i saw them reach for the discrete cup, i thought it meant excess. * we had a clothes line that ran from one side of the yard to the other. i loved to press my nose into the clean white sheets; the fabric softener so faint i could hardly smell it, and the scent of wind, which passed through. flavored by blackberries and ladybugs. sunday mornings felt mystical; everything was cleaned.

33

Nonfiction

Bianca Smith

The Old Neighborhood

Leana Nancy Benedetti Pellicci Zanardo grew up in the old neighborhood during the 1930s—a predominantly Italian block on Chicago’s Southwest Side. She lived on Coulter, between Blue Island and Cermak. Twenty years later in the same neighborhood, she would have her lady friends over every Friday night to play cards and drink vodka on the rocks, their long, painted fingernails clinking against their glasses as their kids ran around the light post outside.

Tina, her second daughter, grew up in the same neighborhood during the ’60s. Her first daughter, Denise, would have, too, if cancer hadn’t taken her when she was four years old.

When Leana moved out of her townhouse in 2016, the movers found Denise’s birth and death certificates in an envelope lodged between an old desk and the basement wall—as if hiding the physical evidence would be enough to make her memory less heavy. The softness of her feet from the raised ridges of her first footprints the hospital collected could still be felt on the thin paper.

Toward the end, Denise’s fingernails started turning blue. Leana would hold both of Denise’s hands, making fierce attempts to warm them. And when Denise overheated, Leana just stared at the nurses as they told her she couldn’t lay in Denise’s hospital bed with her. She’d close her eyes as they tried to pry Denise loose from her grip, begging them to cut her open and use her organs to replace Denise’s failing ones. Throughout the seven months when she sat vigil at Denise’s bedside, there were times when Leana would blink, and suddenly her body would be contorted to comfortably fit the wiry guest chair, the one that she positioned in the furthest back corner of the room—it faced the window. Leana counted the cars that made three-point turns out of the lot. In her mind, she formed animals from the smoke that billowed out of the vents protruding from the side of the building. She watched clumps of snow shake off the branches of the pine tree with the wind. Denise’s nails turned purple the day she died.

Leana hasn’t missed any of Denise’s sixty-one birthdays—she still has the receipts for the flowers she plants near Denise’s tiny headstone.

Tina was born in 1959, four years after Denise died. When Tina was young, she would inquire about Denise while she and Leana painted each other’s nails the same frosted peach color. Leana divulged vaguely about her first girl, and Tina would picture Denise affixed to the cross with nails through her palms and patent leather loafers. Tina never saw blood streaming from her sister’s hands, only a soft smile spread across her otherwise featureless face. During every service, Denise was above the priest’s head, and Tina would try to stay fixed on the stained glass behind them, her curiosity fracturing off into the blues and yellows of each welded shard.

34

Bianca Smith

••• Leana’s husband, Neal, was a second-generation Italian-American. His face was so round that the running joke within his family was that he had no chin whatsoever—despite this lacking feature, Neal’s lips were always fixed into a slight smile and his eyes looked like dark chocolate chips. He acquired Pisa Ravioli Company from his father in the early 1950s, selling pasta, pizzas and Italian beef to grocery stores and restaurants. Every day, after closing up at 3:00 p.m., he would go to the YMCA and play basketball with his buddies before heading out to dinner. This routine was permanent—a priority. His strained relationship with Leana led him to assume a rigid, dominant role. When Neal came home, he’d find their mutt, Princess, tied to the back porch and Leana’s neighborhood friends visiting. He wasn’t ever greeted as he found his way to his favorite chair, Scotch in hand.

On the rare occasion that Neal did eat dinner at home, he would make Tina sit at the table until she finished her meal. She had perfected all of the tried and true ways to discard food she didn’t want to eat—she spit her vegetables into a napkin, moved the food to the outskirts of the plate and worked to outlast her father’s patience. Sometimes when he’d leave the table to go to the bathroom, Leana would say, “Go. Just go.” Tina would run off to her room, relieved, while Leana either made an excuse for her or let Neal’s complaints go in one ear and out the other.

Neal never spoke much of Denise or what it was like to lose a child—but neither did Leana.

“God blessed me with you, another girl,” he’d tell Tina.

Tina came to believe that he had meant well.

Neal and Leana didn’t live together after 1977, but he still managed to show up at Romano Brothers—the wine and spirits distributor where both Leana and Tina worked—unannounced.

Tina would drag her feet to the lobby after she received another message from the receptionist that said her father was there to see her. Every time she greeted him with, “Dad. What are you doing here?”

And every stale conversation they shared on the phone didn’t go unnoticed: Tina’s husband Mark, whom she had dated on and off for three years prior to their marriage on Tax Day, recognized Neal’s isolation. Mark’s own father had committed suicide when Mark was thirteen.

Mark was in a conjoining room when it happened. Growing up without his father made Mark understand how important it was for Tina to reconcile with Neal. Like the businessman that he was, Mark convinced her to show up at Neal’s Berwyn apartment with a bottle of wine to share with him and his newest lady friend. The brief, nervous hugs quickly morphed into warm smiles and deep-bellied laughs, and eventually, their small gathering evolved into a larger family affair. Tina was pregnant with me, her first child, Bianca, and she wanted Neal to know his grandchildren. She felt sorry for him—she had started her own family and wanted him to be a part of it.

35

Nonfiction

A year after they reconciled, Mark, Tina, Neal, Leana and other immediate family members started celebrating holidays together. Slowly, as they spent more holidays with the rest of the family, Leana and Neal reconciled. Leana and Neal gave each other a hug when everyone filed out of Tina’s house after Christmas morning in the early 2000s. Leana cried when Neal passed away in 2010, but she didn’t grow any more worry lines sitting in the stiff oak chair that was stationed next to his hospital bed. When he would flash back to his time in Germany during World War II, she stared past him—through the walls until she was lying with Denise again.

I remember Neal yelling and crying and punching in that urine-yellow nursing home full of grief-stricken moans. No matter how hard I, the second of his three granddaughters, gritted my teeth, or bit the inside of my right cheek, I couldn’t help but succumb to the burn at the back of my throat. I cried, silently, as my mother clipped Neal’s nails and the hair that was sticking out of his ears and nose.

It was 2005, and Neal hadn’t eaten or bathed in a little over a week. He hadn’t remembered to. I have relived the moment we knew he was sick again and again: walking into his apartment with my mother to find Neal in bed, responsive but a shell of a shell of a person.

And I have played back the second-to-last time I saw him, in 2010. Neal didn’t talk much at all, but we knew he was still awake because he would smile every so often. He stayed reclined in bed with the TV playing even though he didn’t watch it. We all just kind of looked at him while my mother talked, asking him what he was watching on TV and how he was doing, giving him prompts that were met with silence. Gianna, his third granddaughter, was already crying, and that meant MarcAnthony, his third grandson, was too. We kissed his forehead, and told him we loved him. And as we were leaving, he opened his eyes and said, “My beautiful girls.”

••• To my father: I’ve written you so many times. I’ve written you so many times and I’ve placed the letters on your desk myself but they fall into your paper shredder before you can read them and I want to know why. I want to know why.

I want to know why you didn’t change your name to Charter Arms Bulldog when your father used one to push a bullet through his brain. I need you to remember. I need you to remember all the bullets you’ve swallowed—I’ve swallowed bullets too, but you think the weight you carry is greater.

••• When Mark proposed to Tina, she hit him on the arm and didn’t say anything. Whenever 36

Bianca Smith

he recounts the story now, that’s how he says it: “She didn’t say anything! I had to ask her if that meant yes! Can you believe that?”

Hearing his account for the umpteenth time, Tina doesn’t even glance over to see who he’s reciting his story to. She knows he’s invested enough in this telling that he wouldn’t notice if she rolled her eyes—but she knows if he caught her sigh he’d break character fast. He’d stare through her and hiss, “What? Is that not how it happened?”

Tina, instead, blurts out a two-beat laugh. She works through the rest of the dishes wordlessly, as if her feet are sewn into the mat at the base of the sink. She stares out the window at the squirrel scaling the side of the biggest tree in her backyard—her hand follows the decorative navy circle on the outer edge of the plate. Her hands are pruning and the squirrel is still, perched on a low branch, patting a wide yellow leaf like it’s testing it for balance. Her focus switches between his bushy tail and the small holes that make up the window screen. If she pours her concentration out onto the tree branches, she thinks, she won’t be able to listen to whatever he mumbles as he walks past her to the fridge.

“Tina. We need more cheese,” he says. “Can you get more cheese when you go to the store next?”

She grabs another dish. He leaves the fridge door open after he grabs one of his new products and proceeds to carry it back over to the guest, explaining how much business this product line has brought him. The cool air from the fridge licks the back of her neck, and her stomach ties in knots. She knows she has fallen out of love with him—his aggression, his selfcenteredness—but staying in their marriage is easier than leaving.

She closes the door and slips out of the kitchen without anyone noticing. She walks slowly through the hallway, up the stairs to her bedroom, letting her feet press new patterns into the carpet’s baroque design. Her trek to the second floor is labored—her long fingers clutching the banister for stability, the sweat on the nape of her neck staining the back of her black Old Navy t-shirt.

She passes her bedroom door, her dresser with three large school portraits of her children and her king-sized bed with one nightstand beside it. Once she reaches her bathroom she lets her legs gently buckle. Laying on the marble floor, she stares at the ceiling, picturing the squirrel and his leaf. Her legs stretch perpendicular to the grout on the cold tiles, toes pointing outward and palms facing upward. She closes her eyes.

••• Tradition doesn’t replicate itself exactly. There’s always some sort of variance. And despite these differences in storyline, don’t you want them to feel achingly identical? At the core of 37

Nonfiction

your parallel narratives—you and your mother’s, you and your father’s, your mother’s and her mother’s—they are the same. Sacrifice mirrors sacrifice, celebration mirrors celebration—you are a carbon copy of someone else. They are you and you are them and their story will always be yours.

Do you ever lay and trace the shadows the streetlamps make when they filter through your blinds onto the ceiling? No one is drag racing on Lake Shore Drive at four o’clock in the morning—at least, if they are, they’re driving on the lake and the water fills their mufflers so all revving is absorbed. The homeless are asleep beneath you. The family whose newborn had colic can sleep through the night now. The drug deals across the street are silent. Only your feet, dancing across the hardwood floors to the bathroom, can be heard. It’s because your ankles crack when you walk, just like your mother’s.

The air conditioning is set to sixty-eight degrees, just like your grandmother’s house, and you’re lying naked on the bath mat until the steam of the shower pours over its glass enclosure onto the mirror. In your mind, you draw hearts and your initials into the fog on the cabinet, like you would do on the inside of a cold car window back when your mom drove a white van. The cold marble under the rough terrycloth towel you’ve sunken into coaxes bumps to rise on your skin, but you are heavy and only half-conscious.

You read a science fiction book once that said souls were metallic like lead and soft like a silicone implant. A group of souls came and took over our human bodies, making new homes.

Look down at your skin and try to comprehend how you’re real. You’re trying to count all of the pores on your hands but you get lost in the field of hair on your forearms. The sun has scattered little memories all over, some spots darker than the others. And once your body was much smaller—the light pink tree branches on the inside of your thighs remind you. Are you your body, or are you your soul? It must be your mother in you that is concerned about what happens to your soul once your body is burned into the earth. Will the bumps on the back of your arms and the smile lines on your face and the large spaces between your toes be lost to the erasure of consciousness?

Your eyes keep closing involuntarily like your mother’s do around 8:30 p.m. and you forget to check the water before you’re immersed in it. Your skin is now dotted with heat chills but you can feel, so you count that as a victory. As you push a quarter-sized amount of shampoo into your scalp, you can feel groups of hairs falling free from your head. You’re rinsing, pulling away the parts of you that have rejected themselves from the now, and out of habit, placing them on the tile to the left of you. You swirl them together, cursing tradition and your mother and your father and your mother’s mother. You think about all of the skin you lose in one day. It’s approximately 0.003 ounces. That’s almost two pounds a year. You scrub your skin with a little more force. You think about today, and how you and your mother and your father and your mother’s mother might be around tomorrow for another shower. And ten years later for that shower. And maybe in sixty years you won’t be showering alone—you’ll have someone else shampoo your scalp in a nursing 38

Bianca Smith

home bathroom because the sun spots will have permanently dehydrated your arms, making them too tired to reach for anything higher than your waist.

But nothing will fall out of your head, and you wonder if you’ll have come to terms with your existence: a hair you didn’t catch before it fell down the drain.

••• To the daughter I’ll never have: They tell me you will be perfect, this cluster of us with practiced proportions and eyes so bright they’ll have to be sealed shut.

They tell me you will be me, just as I am all those who came before. But I am a black hole, a rip in space and time—I know I never want my stars to multiply.

39

Visual Media

Sam Dobson

Aesthetically Internal

2017, Lard, Pigment, Dimensions Variable.

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Sam Dobson

Self-Portait on Tuesday

2017, Lard, Oil Paint, Perspex, Dimensions Variable.

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Nonfiction

Bailey E. Heille

Maniac

Sometimes we forget that the dew settles on the sand too. But the lighthouse is what I remember, its deep crimson blaring safety and familiarity. I climb down over the dunes and I’m met with an expanse of blue-green that seamlessly fades into the soft blue of the sky that stretches out as my ceiling. Seagulls squawk their greedy call, circling the shore like drones.

The wind bites me with its distinct taste, one that taunts that it can never be caught in a jar. It whips with the freedom to go where it wills. Beneath my feet the sand disperses, soft but steady, cradling my insoles. And the sun ceaselessly shines on the crown of my head, spreads along scapula, ripples down my vertebrae, and wraps around my legs. And with the sun’s burning embrace, the continuously pulsing waves look so much less formidable now.

And as I begin to leave shore, I hear my brothers a few yards away, laughter paired with aggression as they wrestle each other to the sand. My little sister kicks up water as she tries to part the sea so she can make it back to shore. Her blonde hair falls in thick streaks plastered to her shoulders and her lips have begun to match the icy blue of her giant eyes. She flings sand backward as she heads up shore where my mom drapes a towel around her shoulders and gives her a squeeze, hoping to take her shivers away. My dad’s head bobs in the distant blue ahead like a buoy beckoning. I dive forward and, though the water feels like ice, I focus on the gentle pulling of my curls unfurling to form a veil against my back as I swim onward.

In the same scene, the crimson paint on the lighthouse is peeling. And senior citizens will file complaints when the city primes the beacon with white. On the other side of that bluegreen expanse is a black-brown spill of oil. The crisp air carries with it the stench of rotting fish, reminding us of the dark side of wild. My sister can’t stop shivering. And Trent got too rough and Miles got mad. My dad forgot sunblock and his back is turning bright red. And I am walking away from it all, possessed step on slimy rocks, crossed arms with fingertips clutching and clawing in between ribs, losing footing, and seeing how much water my lungs can take before I become breathless.

Both of these beaches are true. And both exist simultaneously. If I try to remember that shining beach, I’m met with the stinging of my nails among my ribs. Each time I see that chipping crimson paint, I hear my brothers laughing in that uncanned air, but they are far away like dancing lights growing fainter in the rearview mirror. I believe that these things are true; help my unbelief. For when you can’t trust the way your mind interprets things, how do you know what is happening?

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Bailey E. Heille

••• It is the lead in your veins that has leaked to make the world turn to steel gray. You can’t lift them to the sun and use the beams as a backlight. They sit there like jewelry from an ex, where the shine has turned bitter and the gleam turned ragged. And though everything has turned to hollow wax casts, hot bronze bubbles at your feet and you don’t know what to make of its gurgling. In fact, you don’t know what to make at all. But in order to keep your feet from getting bogged down you start to run, bumping into their shapes and figures. And as you collide, they tumble because they have nothing inside. And you’re running, and they’re falling and the bronze is spreading, and the figures become those you haven’t even met yet, and still they are molds that you dodge and collide, and they fall, the lifeless figures that you have never seen. But if you keep running maybe can keep yourself from being turning to stone. You don’t understand it, you just have to keep moving forward. For this is no night to drown in.

••• I have a cactus. I call him Judas, but I still don’t know what he is. He is either an Euphorbia pseudocactus, or an Euphorbia grandicornis. The first implies that Judas is not really a cactus at all. The second can literally be translated to “large horned.” When I bought him, the colloquial “Zig Zag” was given as his species, which both types have been called. The only definite thing is that Judas is Euphorbia. And this doesn’t even say much about the plant because the origin of Euphorbia comes from the discoverer of the plant, whose name was Euphorbus. But that means “true bearer of life.” So Judas is the either the true bearer of life—fake cactus, or he is the true bearer of life with large horns. But right now he is on a plant stand, his roots exposed, with no identity at all, because he could be two things and yet for the last five months he’s been neither.

Because, to me, he is Judas and I’m not really sure what that is, just that he is.

It’s hard to figure out what you are when your emotions are suspect and the truth keeps changing. When I was a child my mom used to call me “a party on wheels,” always bouncing off the walls and wanting to have a good time. Now my mom sends me introvert memes and tells me she wishes I wasn't alone so often. She tells me that reading and going to the dog park shouldn't be how I'm spending my young adult life. She asks me why I'm sad, and I have to try to explain to her that I'm not sad, I just don't want to leave my apartment. The last time I remember feeling happiness that did not sting and then fade to gray, was when I was eleven. At twelve the depression hit, and I don't know what is me and what is it anymore.

Other times I call her and tell her how I stayed up ’til 3:00 a.m. cleaning the kitchen. She, exasperated, tells me that I never did that at home and asks how I even cleaned a kitchen for so long. I explain how I did the dishes, wiped the counters, organized the cupboards, cleaned the fridge, scrubbed the burners, swept the floors, sorted the silverware by size and type, and inspected the microwave. My mom then reminds me how I never even made my bed when I was home all summer long. So I don’t explain to her how I reorganized my closet by color and sleeve 43

Nonfiction

length and switched all the hangers so that all t-shirts would have gray hangers with notches, all sweaters have yellow hangers with no notches, and each section of hanging clothes has a different type of hanger.

I don’t tell her how, instead of taking notes in class, I write pages of stream of consciousness and then go against the lines and turn my notebook sideways so I can write over those pages in landscape form, creating a thatch weave of ink and remnants of the alphabet. I don’t tell her how I skip to class with a smile shining in my eyes because the world is an amazing place. I don't tell her that even though I can’t contain my happiness, I can’t internalize it either. I feel every emotion so intensely, but they all bounce away as soon as I meet them. It’s as if I’m invincible. I don’t tell my mom that when I feel like this I walk through crosswalks with my eyes closed.

I don’t tell my mom that I don’t know in which of these moods I’m rooted. I tell her I’m here and that I like to clean obsessively and I like to lie in bed trying to find homeostasis. Gnothi seauton.

••• Seven hundred military laboratories developed the food that is on our supermarket shelves.

After World War II, the military was tasked with keeping its food rations at a constant state of preparedness, which meant researching better preservation methods. And that’s how food developed a shelf life. So, you can say with honesty that nearly everything you eat is a result of military laboratory experiments. Even things labeled “natural” have still been impacted by these lab foods. You can’t get away from the clutches of history.

Bipolar has stung me like a jellyfish across my wrist, but it has not left me stunned. Mental illness isn’t something easily compartmentalized. Even when it is under control, it leaves a stain and creates a veil that blurs the stage. Multiple realities exist and can’t be sorted for fear that I might discount something real. I can’t know if what happened is being filtered through an illness or is just being filtered by me. Whether I’ll ever know if I’m a pseudocactus or the true bearer of life is up in the air, but I know I’m a plant that can withstand both heat and beasts. And while I may never be able to tell which parts of me are traces of experiment or experience, I know I’m here and I’m running and my feet aren’t fixed in bronze and my lungs haven't sunk in the waves.

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Jacob Victorine

Jacob Victorine

On the Occassion of 560. January February 2008 by Jean Luc Mylayne

My eyes tell me white flight.

A mess of tangled hair.

Branches like a shock of lightning against bare blue sky and bone colored dirt.

What is Mylayne saying?

What does his camera know that he does not?

I tell my students not to call a neighborhood bad.

How this oversimplification is a product of the systems we live within.

Whiteness. Stark as a bird diving from its branch.

The reportage too many of us take as fact.

What can I learn from what my eyes don’t see— the way the largest branch fades into the sky to reveal so many branches behind it.

Where do my eyes take me against what have I been shown.

Dying leaves in the corner—the bodies I see, but pretend I do not know?

How whiteness sounds like witness from afar.

How do I move closer?—Past the reflection of my form in the glass.

Don’t tell me. I must say their names until my body knows them as my own.

Art Institute of Chicago - July 20, 2015 45

Poetry

Vessel in the Form of Self-Love

After Ocean Vuong When you wake, let the dream of you in another body float.

Press your feet to the floor like two hands in prayer.

Know that love, like time, is not linear—your parents’ deaths will not change how your head unconsciously nods like your father’s the way your mother’s hand reaches from your body to press a daffodil to your nose.

Someday you will love yourself the way Sarah does when it is summertime in your backyard.

V and her many other names for you. Vic your name at summer camp the same as your father’s in Vietnam.

Jacob, naming is just another vessel for love for trying to hold all of another person’s blood in your palms without letting a single drop escape.

There are times loneliness will be a man on fire in the still-dark street you’re not sure to shout to or cry for when the speaker in your poems will be the speaker and when he will be you trying to thread your sanity through the fibers of the page.

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Jacob Victorine

Vessel in the Form of the Body what is it like when I touch your body? in the newborn morning light, body against body you twist in cotton sheets, body inside body are there ways I want to control your body? like a lake after the rainstorm, body gains body volume of an officer’s voice, body forcing body to the ground as if dirt, another brown body is this how your home state loves the brown body? dead in an orange jumpsuit, the photo framed Sandra’s body we talk of how she died, can we truly mourn her brown body a new friend makes the same drive in a week—can she protect her brown body why wouldn’t she be scared, how whiteness colors any other body with blood, you dab the cut on my bare body what’s a wound to a wound, a body to a body? we try to give beyond the body you take Christ in your mouth, body dissolves body we pray before dinner, body blesses body the way we do at the Seder—how I love my people’s body as if ours matter more, after all, we’re each a body what makes us float, draw air from another body? you thrash through a nightmare, bodies haunting body I rub your back, release the stress from your body forget this is a privilege—to have permission to touch a body to be loved and give love amidst another taken body how the sun rises and falls with each and every body

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Bios Alex Arata is a Junior at Columbia College Chicago studying Radio. She spends most of her time reading AP news alerts and listening to podcasts that suit her fluctuating interests. In her free time, she writes poetry and personal essays, and has become increasingly desperate to get more involved in sharing her work. This is her first publication.

Vanessa Borjon is a teaching artist living and working in Chicago IL. She has been previously published in Quaint Magazine, No Assholes, Nepantla and others.

Sam Dobson is a Liverpool-based artist currently working with material, performance and sculpture to explore the ephemeral and ever-changing quality of the internal state. Her work was most recently displayed at the Unit One Gallery in the Gostin's Arcade, Liverpool.

Bailey E. Heille is an essayist and poet from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago and is minoring in Literature and Dance. Her poem “Stones” has been published in The Paper Lantern.

Betty Heredia is a visual artist, born and raised in Chicago. She displays her drawings and paintings at various venues across the city. Betty is also founder of No Checks Accepted Gallery & Community Space, where she curated a group art show, This Way, with members of the Awkward Rebels Collective. Betty Heredia continues her art practice and teaching in Chicago.

Her illustrations have been published in New City, Linework Comics Anthology and Corpus Corpus.

Kenny Kelly received his MFA from Columbia College Chicago and his stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Toad Suck Review, and Watershed Review. He lives in Chicago where he works as a substitute teacher.

Evan Coday Kleekamp is a writer and researcher living in Chicago. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Pinwheel, Drunken Boat, and Adult. An excerpt from his book-inprogress, Three Movements, will be published in Responses, New writings, Flesh, an anthology edited by Ronaldo V. Wilson, Bhanu Kapil and Mg Roberts and published by Nightboat Books.

Ayla Maisey is originally from Portland, Oregon and lives in Chicago studying Creative Writing. Her writing has been previously published in Kent State University's literature magazine, Brainchild, and is forthcoming from The Lab Review.

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Alison O'Connor is a recent Poetry graduate of Columbia College Chicago. She has read and performed her poetry throughout the Chicago area, including at The Poetry Foundation. Her work has also been featured in The North Chicago Review and Devise Literary Magazine.

Tejas S. is a junior college student from Nagpur, India. He's (almost) eighteen, and likes making people uncomfortable with strange humour. His dilettantism includes cycling, sketching, playing the violin, and doubting himself. He's fascinated with ordinary life and individuals, and is currently focusing his writing on those subjects.

Lawrence Silveira is a current senior at Columbia College Chicago, majoring in Fiction Writing and minoring in Writing for Television. He’s set to graduate at the end of the Spring 2017 semester, and the prospect fills him with intense joy, despair, and confusion. His short story “Growing in the Basement” will be featured in the upcoming “Home” edition of The Lab Review.

Bianca Smith is a journalist in Chicago, Illinois and Managing Editor of Echo Magazine. Her work has most recently been featured in Fashion Frank Magazine, Native Voices profile gallery and Modern Luxury Interiors Chicago.

Dan "Sully" Sullivan is an MFA Candidate at Indiana University. He is the founder of the Urban Sandbox Open Mic in Chicago, currently in its fourteenth year. His work has recently appeared in South Side Weekly, The View From Here: Stories About Chicago Neighborhoods, and The Golden Shovel Anthology. His book, The Blue Line Home, is available from EM Press.

Jacob Victorine was born and raised in New York City. His poems appear in places such as Columbia Poetry Review, Vinyl Poetry, Matter, DIALOGIST, Phantom Books, and PANK, which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. His first book, FLAMMABLE MATTER, was published by Elixir Press in 2016. His second manuscript, Dear Anne, Dear Sarah, Dear Melita, was a semifinalist for the 2016 Fordham University Press POL Prizes. He currently lives in Chicago with his fiancée, Sarah, and their cats, Gilgamesh and Sita. Find him at jacobvictorine. com

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Acknowledgements

Habitat is eternally grateful to our hard-working team of editors, readers, designers, and staff. We are, of course, also eternally grateful for the exceptional work of the writers and artists featured in this issue; without them, this issue would not be possible. Thank you to the Stomping Ground staff for always sharing your creative energy with us and producing ever-thoughtul, compelling content: Kendra Allen, Melaina de La Cruz, Frank Enyart, Jessica Unkel, and Kenneth Rupp.

We are extremely proud of the work featured in this issue and are humbled by the courage of our friends and colleagues who chose to share their art with us.

Thank you to Cora Jacobs and Devon Polderman for your support and guidance.

Thank you, the reader.

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HABITAT m a g a z i ne